plantagenet,

Michi is suffering from post-WW2 Japanese amnesia, which was given to the Japanese people by their government following their ignominious defeat by the Western powers.

Plantagenet, Michi if he is 90 then when he went to school the
history of the war was sanitised. The schools just wiped it all out
of schooling. It caused a really great row when the rest of the world
found out what they were teaching.
I saw bus loads of returning prisoners and they were walking skeletons.
Later I worked with a man who had one eye missing. He was not working
hard enough in a Japanese coal mine and was hit in the eye with a rifle butt.
I suspect Michi will not read Slaves of the Sons of Heaven.
It is the story of the Australian POWs on the Burma Railway.
My parents next door neighbour died on the Sandaken March.
Not even the Germans treated POWs like that.

We have been prepared to put it back into history, but if Michi's
attitude is anything to go by then maybe we will bring it out again.

Continued from my preceding comment.
Bazz and plantagenet,

I do not deny there were comfort women. That a lot of Korean women were abducted was a lie started by a Japanese.
I sent a comment, American Humanism, on Chinese Comfort Women at amazon usa. It is a very short course. You can also know something about China.

Some details by a Japanese expert are on the Internet at the following address:

http://www.seisaku-center/node/840.

Perhaps you can go there as I did at The Comfort Women Issue in Sharper Focus.
Ikuhiko Hata/Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone is a comprehensive treatise. You can read three book reviews by three experts and two comments at amazon usa. (Hata is one of the authorities on the second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945. I will perhaps quote him in the comments that I will continue.)

I will not deny, because I deny that women were abducted, that prisoners of war were not humanitarianly by the Japanese.

But Nazi Germany was different from the 1930s' Japan, which perhaps I will mention in the comments to follow. Japan was not a totalitarian country even under the enormous political and social pressures of carrying out the war with China and the US.
It seems that German treatment of Slav soldiers was hideous throughout the whole period. A. J. P. Taylor said somewhere, as I read, that they captured about six hundred thousand Russians in the first few weeks and they were so busy and anxious to get to Moscow that they left them unable to run away and starving. I do not know literally all of them died of starvation.

To be continued

Well now we see the Japanese hiding the truth, they have never pleaded
guilty to what they did. They do not even admit it in a restricted
stage such as OLO.
Railway ? What railway ? Never heard of the Burma railway !
It is quite possible that Michi has never heard about their atrocities.
Read about Slaves of the Sons of Heaven !
Don't bother coming back until you have read it. Most libraries have it.

Bazz and plantagenet,

I knew about the construction of the Thai-Myanmar Railway and the allied prisoners were made to work in miserable conditions. I saw the movie The Bridge Over The River Kway; of course it was largely a romantic fiction for money, though. I knew a lot of allied prisoners worked in Japanese mines, etc. The photos of skinny people were painful to see. At that time almost all Japanese were always hungry.
But the Japanese should not be criticized for what they did not do. Japanese development of Korea and the so-called Comfort Women have nothing or little to do with the treatment of the allied prisoners of war.
No allied prisoners were lynched or beaten after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing anywhere in Japan. In Hiroshima twelve US soldiers were killed in the bomb explosion. About thirty Dutch missionaries lived in a small city about sixty kilometers to the north of Hiroshima, no injury was done to them. Nine allied prisoners were killed in the atomic blast
in Nagasaki, They put away destroyed things in cooperation with the Japanese.

Lewis Bush, a British, wanted to fight for his country, but he did not fight long, for soon after the outbreak of the war he was captured by Japanese in Hong Kong and sent to Japan. You can read His life in Japan
on the Internet; you can go there, because I did, at "Clutch of Circumstance, Allied POWs Under the Japanese.

A little over ten years ago, I think, a group of experts of Stanford University compared high school history textbooks of Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan and the US. I read a Japanese newspaper report that said that the Japanese got the highest favorable rating.
To be continued.

Continued from above.

I said China started its anti-Japanese campaign in 1995 for domestic and for international audience. Rhee Syngman, the first president of the ROK, needed to arouse and strengthening anti-Japanese feelings to shore up his political basis. He had to do it also because South Korea had communists and communist sympathizers within. President Kim Younhsam, 1993-88, renewed and invigorated anti-Japanese feelings. Japanese politics has been divided between lefts and rights. AS President No Taewoo, 1998-1993, said to a Japanese magazine, the lefts gave cheer to the Chinese and Korean movements. All these things have had a great deal to do with the internationally held belief that Japanese have not repented of their past deeds, or that they are whitewashing their crimes.

Now the Nanjing atrocities. The Chiang Kaishek's government soon began the international campaign of three hundred thousand Chinese murdered. They knew how best they could do it. They did it through a few Westerners' mouths to make it credible.
The Chinese commander in charge of the area had fled away from the city without leaving any instruction. There was not order among the Chinese soldiers, They started some rampage on Chinese people.
The Japanese army units came, Chinese soldiers took off their military uniforms and wearing civilian clothes stole into the general civilian populace. Yet they did not stop fighting. They attacked the Japanese from behind and among Chinese people. The Japanese got panicky because they could not tell apart soldier and civilians. Then the carnage started.
The Japanese did not have composure or time to sift combatants and non-combatants accurately. No doubt a lot of innocent Chinese were killed. A lot of women were assaulted. About twenty thousand soldiers ran away into the International Settlement. It was against international law for the Settlement to take them in, but the Japanese did not chase after them, respecting the status of the Settlement.
To be continued.